Southbound Brewing Co. to launch operations later this year

Georgia Tech undergrads Smith Mathews and Carly Wiggins skipped the accounting middle man. They received beer for their work, joining the staff at Atlanta's SweetWater Brewing Company. Mathews worked the bottling line; Wiggins led brewery tours.

"I heard you got free beer if you volunteered, so I volunteered a lot," Mathews said. "In many cases, you could drink while working the line."

It didn't take many pints for the Statesboro native to decide his fixation should be his vocation. He changed his major from aerospace engineering to business management, went to brewing school upon graduating from Georgia Tech and eventually returned to SweetWater to work the brewhouse - this time for a paycheck.

Now, he's brewing up his own brewery, right here in Savannah. He and Wiggins, a marketing professional, will open Southbound Brewing Co. later this year in a 13,000-square-foot facility on East Lathrop Avenue.

They're due to take delivery of their custom-built brewing equipment in October and they hope to have their first batch ready for distribution - and their brewery open for tours and tastings - in early 2013.

The duo hopes to capitalize on Savannah's burgeoning craft beer scene. Long-standing microbrewery Moon River has been joined by craft brew pubs The Distillery and World of Beer in recent years, and a handful of homebrewers also call the city home.

"Savannah is a food city on the verge of being a beer city," Wiggins said. "We want to be a part of that."

Friends and business partners

Mathews and Wiggins make strange bizfellows.

They grew up together, their families living just a few miles apart on Statesboro's edges. They first worked together as lifeguards at Forest Heights Country Club.

They went to separate high schools - Mathews to Bulloch Academy; Wiggins to Statesboro High - only to end up at Georgia Tech together.

Wiggins was the one to coax Mathews to SweetWater. She went to work at the brewery "on my 21st birthday" and relayed "the deal" - free beer for workers - to her childhood buddy. While Mathews shifted his academic focus to business management with an eye toward starting his own brewery, Wiggins also geared her marketing and industrial design studies toward the beverage industry.

"Seventy-five percent of my projects in school were alcohol-related," Wiggins said. "It caught a lot of my professors off guard, but I think it will make sense to them now."

Wiggins stayed on at SweetWater following her graduation from Georgia Tech. She worked in the marketing department while Mathews completed his four-month brewer's training, which took him to Chicago and then Germany.

Mathews returned to SweetWater in a brewer's role in January 2010 and worked that job for 10 months before being hired as the head brewer at a start-up microbrewery in Charleston, S.C. He worked there eight months and left to finish his master's degree in business administration, which he earned from Georgia Southern University in August 2011.

Mathews developed the vision for Southbound Brewing in his master's thesis. He and Wiggins started the business last fall. They raised $750,000 in four days from family and friends, secured a Small Business Association loan, found and leased their brewing plant, ordered their equipment and secured the necessary permits and a distributor.

Mathews perfected his recipes for his three signature beers - an IPA, a pale ale and a Belgian White - while Wiggins worked on the branding. Mathews and Wiggins love music as much as they do beer, so the name of the company and the beers would be loose references to their favorite songs.

They moved to Savannah in July to oversee start-up operations.

"We've learned a lot along the way," Mathews said.

Grand plans

SweetWater's brewmaster, Mark Medlin, could sense his new brewer would one day start his own operation soon after Mathews stepped into the brewhouse in January 2010.

Medlin recognized the brewer's basics - attention to detail, organization, "over-the-top" cleanliness, the ability to multitask - in Mathews, as well as an important intangible: Passion.

"More than anything else, you have to care about what you're doing and know what you do affects the quality of the product," Medlin said. "And you have to know quality is important for the success of the company."

Such has been SweetWater's approach since it started in 1997. The brewery now distributes in seven states and was named the 2012 Grand Champion Brewery in the U.S. Open Beer Championship.

Mathews and Wiggins hope to follow SweetWater's lead. They intend to establish Southbound's reputation locally, brewing five 1,000-gallon batches - the three signature brews plus two rotating varieties - at a time. They envision their three-person operation producing 3,000 kegs in the first year.

Their facility will have a 12,000-keg capacity, enough to take Southbound statewide and eventually into South Carolina and Florida.

"I don't ever see us getting on Samuel Adams level, but we do want to have a strong regional presence," Mathews said. "Our specialty beers, our barrel-aged brews, will put us on the map and we may distribute that nationally, but quality control will always be the first priority."

ON THE WEB

Visit southboundbrewingco.com to learn more about the brewery and founders Smith Mathews and Carly Wiggins.